The madness of psychiatric medications

An interview with prizewinning journalist Robert Whitaker about his new book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, appeared in Salon yesterday. Whitaker doesn’t just blame a powerful pharmaceuticals industry for the virally increasing use of anti-psychotic drugs, as writers have done before him. His book is a history of American psychiatry, in which he shows that it was when the numbers of clients seeking psychiatric help began declining that psychiatrists began radically increasing their rates of diagnosing serious mental illnesses among their patients, and correspondingly began increasing the number of prescriptions they wrote for psychotropic medications.

Whitaker also argues that the drugs may be doing more harm than good. Long-term studies suggest that schizophrenics who refuse to take anti-psychotics do better, over time, than those on meds. And “Children who take stimulants for ADHD, he writes, are more likely to suffer from mania and bipolar disorder than those who go unmedicated.”

In any case, Whitaker dares to ask, “If ‘wonder drugs’ like Prozac are really helping people, why has the number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness skyrocketed from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today?” Are doctors both over-prescribing and over-diagnosing? The hugely disproportionate dependency on pharmaceuticals in America suggests that the author’s description of the U.S. as “a dangerously over-medicated culture” is on target.

Surprisingly, people suffering from schizophrenia do better in poor countries than in rich ones, Whitaker reports. I think it’s because in a culture that isn’t hyper-modern, neighbors are more likely to include schizophrenics as members of the community instead of walling them off into invisible social ghettos.

So please consider choosing one person who shares our public spaces but is socially isolated by mental illness to have coffee and conversation with, one hour a week. Freestyle Volunteer has suggestions about how to go about companioning someone with a mental illness, along with some stories about Freestyle Volunteering in this way. Companionship with trusted others keeps us all on a more even keel.